July 16, 2024

Re: Kierkegaard, Religion, and the Ethics of Social Media

If Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) were alive today, would he have a Twitter/X account? Indeed, given Kierkegaard’s penchant for pseudonymity, it seems possible that he would have created a miscellany of “sock puppet” or “burner” accounts, engaging hot-button issues in and through a number of online personae:

Johannes Climacus @jclimacus44 19h

When a believer of #Christianity exists in #faith, his existence has enormous content, but not in the sense of a yield in paragraphs. 🤨 @GWF_Hegel1 @jpmynster1775

And yet, perhaps it would have been the other way around. Maybe Kierkegaard would have written a book (or a book review!) about the dangers of social media, insisting that it’s nothing more than an abstract, depersonalized space intended for half-baked opinions and base desires. Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine the Dane standing outside the Menlo Park offices of Meta Platforms, Inc.—the tech conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, among other social media services—and handing out pamphlets warning against the influence of what he once called “the public, the crowd, the rabble, public opinion…responsible for the most nauseating atrocities and misuse of power.”

So, which is it? Was Kierkegaard a Twitter troll or Luddite prophet? Or is there a mediating alternative? These are, of course, hypothetical questions, but they are not irrelevant. As I have argued at length elsewhere, Kierkegaard was both a participant in and critic of the technological revolution that indelibly marked nineteenth-century Danish culture. Thus his philosophical-theological reflections on the significance of mass transportation, commercial industry, and, above all, popular media can help us think through the same issues today.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in this estimation. Several months ago, I was asked by the venerable Journal of Religious Ethics to contribute to an upcoming “Focus Issue” on “Kierkegaard, Religious Ethics, and Media.” This endeavor was hatched in Denver in November 2022, when the American Academy of Religion hosted a panel on the subject. I was not there in person, though one of my Villanova doctoral students—a promising scholar named Koa Robinson—was a participant. There was talk about collecting the papers into a single volume, and eventually I was invited to craft an essay in response. I wrapped up my contribution in April 2024, and the edition is now available online. The print version will be available in a few months.

The issue kicks off with an introduction by John Haman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Dayton. It is followed by a quartet of pieces:

1. “Kierkegaard, Lippmann, and the Phantom Public in a Digital Age,” also written by Haman.

2. “Kierkegaard, Social Media, and Despair” by Robinson, who began crafting this paper in one of my PhD seminars.

3. “Authorship and Accountability: Kierkegaard and Anonymity in the Press,” authored by Joseph Westfall, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston-Downtown.

4. My own, prosaically titled “Response to Focus Issue,” which rounds out the topic.

The essays proper are as fascinating as they sound. Haman intriguingly argues that Kierkegaard’s polemics against the press have analogs within the press, particularly in the person of American reporter and political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), who has been called the “Father of Modern Journalism.” Next, in a kind of case study of Kierkegaard’s concept of “the single individual” (den Enkelte), Robinson traces how one young woman learned to detach from social media in order to regain psycho-spiritual balance and tranquility. Finally, Westfall suggests that Kierkegaard’s critique of journalism might serve as an occasion for ethical and social renewal: whereas social media is famed for its “bots” and “trolls,” Kierkegaard enjoins us to take personal responsibility for what we say and do—yes, even on Twitter!

Each of these articles is worth reading and pondering, though, in my own piece, I do register an overarching concern:

While I certainly have no objection to using Kierkegaard to encourage journalists to reflect on, say, the nature of det Publikum and how it can be abused for propagandistic purposes, I doubt that Kierkegaard himself would differentiate between “good journalism” and “bad journalism.” For the medium itself, pitched at a mass audience and intended to perpetuate reflection and incredulity, triggers the mechanism of leveling. As Kierkegaard puts it in one 1847 journal entry, “The daily press is and remains the evil principle (onde Princip) in the modern world. There are no boundaries to its sophistry, since it can always sink to lower and lower levels of readers. As a result, it churns up so much misery that no state (Stat) can cope with it” (Kierkegaard, 2002, 152).¹

This last statement, particularly as a vitriolic presidential election looms in November 2024, bears an ominous ring. Has a technologically-disseminated popular media outstripped humanity’s ability to manage it? And, if so, what comes next? Have we now definitively entered what, in 2007, French theorist René Girard called an “apocalyptic moment,” whereby “the possibility of an end to Europe, the Western world and the world as a whole” (Girard, 2010, ix, xvii) has become real? The papers featured in this focus issue do not seem to think so, though I doubt Kierkegaard would share their optimism. Nevertheless, they are all united in the task to think critically about popular media—an important terminus a quo in an era too often defined by journalistic bias, psycho-spiritual unwellness, and ethical apathy.

The above paragraphs were written well before the shocking events of the last few weeks—first, President Joe Biden’s much-maligned performance in his June 27 presidential debate with former President Donald J. Trump and, second, the attempted assassination of Trump on July 13. In both cases, the “legacy media” and “social media” have played outsized, controversial, and potentially transformative roles. It is an ideal time, then, to read Kierkegaard and to wrestle with his thinking.

1. This is my translation. The standard reference to this passage in Kierkegaard’s Skrifter would be as follows: SKS 20, NB2:29.